Theater: Painful Truth the Octette Bridge Club

by P.J. Barry

The most common lament of stage actresses is a lack of good parts for older women. The Octette Bridge Club, a comedy about eight matronly Irish Catholic sisters who meet every other Friday during the 1930s and 1940s to play cards and swap stories, remedies that problem. The narrative is slight and achieves its climaxes by announcing rather than portraying them. But the current production displays some of Broadway's most skilled actresses demonstrating how to employ the briefest dialogue to imply unspoken volumes. Playwright Barry keeps the inner lives of the sisters well guarded, by intention: he means to examine the...

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